


The Belonging You Seek

by lusilly



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Baby Rey, Family, Force-Sensitive Rey, Gen, Names
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-26
Updated: 2016-03-26
Packaged: 2018-05-29 04:49:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6359950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lusilly/pseuds/lusilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which a little girl finds an X-wing in the desert, and she finds a helmet, and she finds a name.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Belonging You Seek

**Author's Note:**

> Yknow the X-wing visible in the wide shot when Rey is speeding past the fallen Star Destroyer? Yeah, this is that one.
> 
> (Props to anyone who gets the low key EU reference in Rey's nickname.)

The girl doesn’t know how old she is.

This is the second question on her list.  _How old am I?_   comes in right below  _What’s my name?_   and just above  _Why did you leave me here?_   She doesn’t write them down - she doesn’t write, not except for the scratches she makes on the wall of her rusting shelter - but she holds the questions one by one in her mind.  _What’s my name? How old am I? Why did you leave me?_   Sometimes at night she lays in the blue cold and asks the questions over and over again in her mind, repeating them as if a mantra, or a prayer. As if, if she can think them loud and strong enough, they will somehow be sent sailing into the sky and beyond the stars, to find her family, and to lead them home to her.

She does not know how old she is, so no one can tell her that she is too young to do anything; not that there is anyone who would show so much concern for her, indentured as she is, kept alive her first few years on Jakku more out of spite than anything else. Before Jakku, she knows she had something, she knows she had  _someone_ , but she cannot remember what, or who. It is emptiness to her now: void, like the vacant and sucking expanse of space. She used to give herself an age based on the white scratches on her wall, because her past was nothing: she burst into being, fully formed, with her first breath of hot, dusty desert air. 

Even in the searing daytime heat, the wall of the fallen machine is always cold. She drags her palm across it, unsure if she can feel the scratches beneath her fingers, or if the sensation is all in her head.  _One, two, three_ : she can count, she has always known how to count, but she does not know how she learned. She can recognize letters, and words sometimes, although she knows many who cannot. It is another mystery, one which proves to her that there is more to her past than she knows: that there was someone once who cared for her enough to teach her, and would teach her more, she thinks, if they could just find her.

Now she no longer calls herself an age based on the time spent on Jakku. She cannot accept that her being began on the desert planet. She was more before that, she is sure of it. The most important things that will ever happen in her life have already come to pass, and she cannot remember any of it. But they will be back for her someday. She knows it.

She can feel it in a way others cannot feel things - such  _conviction_ , such  _certainty_ , a voice in the back of her head and a feeling in the pit of her stomach that lights up seconds before something goes wrong. A feeling of  _being_ , a sense of existence. A propensity for finding valuable objects which her fellow scavengers chalk up to small hands and beginner’s luck, but which come to her through ways she can’t explain. When she closes her eyes in the middle of the fallen ships, she hears whispers from within. Ghosts of long-dead occupants, not beings but rather energy which sizzled beneath great slabs of durasteel. The drone and the buzz of power light up mind, and they lead her to the valuable machinery, parts which fetch her so many portions that her fellow scavengers no longer have to sacrifice some of their own to keep her alive. In this same way, with this supernatural certainty, the girl knows that she is on Jakku not to remain, but to be found.

Many of the other scavengers are old women. It is the type of occupation one comes to when one cannot support oneself, when one offers oneself to pay another’s debts, or when one needs to leave but has nowhere else to go. Such things happen most often to women, is what the girl gathers from her friends and her almost-guardians. Without them, and she doesn’t think this often because she does not like being in such debt - but without their help, she would be dead.

It was just past midday, when the sun was highest in the sky and hung in a burnished orange blaze, rippling heat across the desert in trembling mirages. The girl’s pack was light, except for the canister of water she held, as precious as the breath in her lungs – perhaps even more precious, given that each breath dried her mouth and coated her throat with bone-dry dirt, the hot air stifling in her chest, like suffocation on an ultra-slow scale.

Dreamily, she gazed out of a gaping hole in the side of the great fallen ship they scavenged today. A hot wind blew back at her, spraying sand into her face like hot oil piercing at her skin. Something tugged her out towards the desert. It was too hot, too dry, and too far away from the others. But she could not explain it. There was something out there, in the vast emptiness of red desert, an emptiness reflected in the bare blue-gray sky above, and in the chambers of her heart.

A hand swatted against her face. “ _Eharl_ ,” said one of the old women, clicking her tongue at the girl’s idleness. It was an Old Corellian word, and the girl did not know what it meant, but some of the other scavengers had taken to calling using it as a nickname of sorts for her, or a title. A title she had earned one day when a Sullustan male, a thief, tried to steal from her day’s work. He had been bigger than her, but she was quick and smart, and her size belied the threat she posed. Some of the women had watched and laughed at the Sullustan writhing in pain as she stalked away, her possessions in hand. Then, knowingly, one had said, “ _Eharl_. _Eharl_ , that one, if I ever saw one…”

But the old women were not laughing now. “ _Eharl_ , why aren’t you working?” demanded an old woman, lines carved deep into her face. “Your sack is empty. No work, no portions for to eat this night. Yes?”

As the old woman began to limp away, the girl said: “I want to go out there.”

The old woman looked back. The girl pointed out towards the desert. “No, no no,” said the old woman, shaking her head and stumping back towards the girl, her back bent in age. “Not in the desert. In the desert too dangerous place for a little girl, even a little girl who is also _eharl_.” Laughter then, like the high-pitched laughter of the big, cat-like creatures which occasionally staggered into town, half-mad with starvation. “You no outside go. Bad for girl. Stay, and fill up sack so not empty, so belly not so empty tonight.” The woman patted her own stomach, and looked at the girl not unkindly. With finality, she turned, and she stumped away.

For a moment, the little girl was paralyzed with indecision.

But only for a moment.

Then, ignoring the voices of the other scavengers resounding in the massive bowels of the Super Star Destroyer, wondering in a dozen different languages why the girl was heading away from them, why she was splitting away from the group, why she – no, she can’t be – is she heading into the _desert?_

 _There is something out there_ , she thought to herself, stepping out from the shadow of the fallen ship and instantly feeling the hot sand beneath her feet and the sun prickling at the exposed skin at the back of her neck. She lifted one foot, then the other, sinking them into the hot, crystalline sand with every step. _There is something out there_ , she thought; and, though she did not know how, it was calling to her.

She wandered into the constricting heat of the desert. The weight on her shoulders became more pronounced as she struggled up dunes, nearly tumbling down the shifting sand. One day soon, she promised herself, she would find the right compressor cap and finally finish that speeder she was working on. Behind her, the echoing voices faded. They disapproved, but they would not pursue her. On Jakku, so the saying went, the dead look after themselves.

The girl wandered on, unsure where instinct was leading her, or whether it was instinct at all or some kind of evil heat sickness which would take her as soon as she fell, and bury her in the abrasive sands. As her mouth grew dry and her sack grew lighter with each sip of water, she wondered vaguely what she was doing. Is this how she dies, alone in the desert, chasing after a feeling she couldn’t explain?

Her toe stubbed something hard, sending her tumbling through the air and landing with a soft  _thump_ on the sand.

Pain shot through her body from her foot in one sharp blast, then she closed her eyes tightly and held her toe until it lessened. Curiosity obscuring the pain, she opened her eyes and looked around for the source of her injury. A cracked piece of durasteel jutted out from the sand, like the edge of a – what was that? A wing, maybe?

The sun beat down on her, flushing her skin and soaking her in a thin veneer of sweat, to which sand stuck, coating her in a fine layer of dust so thoroughly she could have passed for a cracking statue. But she dug. She had a deep, good feeling, a sense that something was going to happen. That there was something here to find.

Sand and dirt caked underneath her fingernails. The sun slowly began to sink. By the time it was low in the sky, pink and orange hues layering the horizon, she had unearthed…

Well, she wasn’t quite sure what she had unearthed, exactly. It was a starfighter of some kind, much, much smaller than the massive Star Destroyer which had fallen thirty years earlier. Its wings were thin and precise, and her little fingers fiddled at the ends and the sides, prying off everything she could find. Panting with effort, she managed to unearth a cockpit, the transparisteel cracked and broken in a hole just wide enough for her tiny, narrow body.

The girl looked down at the fighter’s little cockpit. It was empty, but a thick layer of sand covered everything within – including a number of untouched trinkets, precious metals yet unscavenged.

She hesitated. She spared one glance back to the Star Destroyer where the other scavengers worked. The horizon was a syrupy golden-orange now, as the sun dipped down to meet the desert. No doubt the others were heading back. She should go with them; she had never been on her own in the desert before, not so far away from shelter. And to the west she could see the sky becoming slowly denser, consuming brown-gray light in a coming sandstorm. It might dissipate before it ever reached her; it might be there in a matter of minutes. Jakku liked to make life difficult for her inhabitants.

In the distance, the little girl could spot a caravan of scavengers heading back to town, no doubt to Unkar Plutt to find what measly sum with which he would provide them today. Deep down in the pit of her stomach, the girl wanted to run after them. She wanted to follow them home. It was easier by far, she thought, to continue living life the only way she had ever known it to be lived, rather than listen to the quiet whispering in the back of her mind that told her something was _there_.

The girl watched the other scavengers disappear. Then she turned back to the sandy cockpit, and she slid herself in feet-first.

It was diving into an icy bath; all breath was crushed from her lungs, her blood instantly freezing in her veins, and for a terrifying icy moment she could not breathe or see or feel. She was suspended, impeded, and the darkness was rushing at her like a vacuum, squeezing her as if through some frozen tube-

Then a roaring heat on her side pierced through the cold and the dark, and the viewport before her lit up with sand for miles and miles beneath her, as far as her eyes could see, and smoke filled the skies, and she could hear screaming – not just on the scratchy comms which filled the space, but she heard screaming she knew she could not possibly hear, like thousands of tiny lights blinking out of existence. It bore into her skull, so loud and powerful she thought surely her head would be rent apart; before her, the desert erupted into fire and smoke and blaze as a starship crashed to the ground, almost as if in slow motion.

It gripped her then, suddenly, and realization washed over her: this was the Battle of Jakku. The ship falling before her was the _Inflictor_ , the Imperial-class Star Destroyer scuttled by its commander, Captain – Captain – it came to her in a flash which carried a lifetime, a home planet and a love of flight, a disillusionment and a captain’s conviction to go down with her ship – _Ree_. _Ciena Ree._ The name came to her like a bolt of lightning, and the girl tried to say the name out loud, but it was obscured by a deafening, intimate screaming, closer than any she’d heard before. The heat on one side of her flared again, searing against her flesh, and the screams were coming from inside the cockpit. They were a woman’s screams, but they did not belong to the girl – wildly, she tried to reach out to the presence she felt, to calm the woman, to bring her peace.

Peace came with a sickening jolt and a skidding succession of _thumps_. The woman’s screaming ceased, and something was thrown from the body’s head, knocked down underneath the controls of the fighter. A battle raged on outside of the small ship, but inside, all had gone quiet in the stifling presence of death.

All at once, it was over.

The girl, her heart pumping, looked up and around. There was no one in the fighter except for her small body, curled up on the pilot’s seat. Outside, it was the deep blue of Jakku night. Darkness had fallen. What had seemed only a few moments must have lasted hours outside of her vision. The girl sat there in the cockpit for a long moment, breathing deeply, blood rushing in her ears.

The lurching of the craft came back to her, and something occurred to her. Flexing her fingers, coughing phlegmy dirt onto her hand, the girl ducked down to reach underneath the controls, and her hand clasped around something round and worn from years in the desert.

When she tugged it out and held it in her hands, the girl’s heart leapt into her throat. She knew what this was.

This was a flight helmet. A relic of the Rebel Alliance.

The girl’s face snapped up as she heard something in the distance, a rushing, roiling whistle. Wind streaking through the desert – bringing with it a cloud and storm of sand. Still clutching the helmet in her hands, the girl scrambled up to her feet to peek out of the cockpit: sure enough, she could see the approaching sandstorm now, feel its first winds whipping at her face and hair. Dread sunk into her stomach. It was far too late to return to town or to the fallen AT-AT she liked to call home. She would have to make do with any shelter she had.

She slipped back down into the cockpit, curling up as small as possible in the seat. She wrapped a length of gauzy cloth around her face to help her breathe and then, as if on instinct, she took the flight helmet, and she slid it over her head.

The storm was long. It lasted through the night, whistling above the girl’s head, throwing harsh sand at her through the cockpit’s hole, screaming the threat of nature: the only threat, the girl thought, that really mattered here on Jakku. Other beings you could always outsmart or outrun. Nature spared no one.

At some point, lulled by the groaning of the starfighter’s durasteel in the wind, the girl drifted off into a vast sleep populated by the same dreams she had every night, of a planet covered in blue, of water as deep and far and beautiful as the desert sands.

Morning came with heat, and the girl awoke to find sand covering every inch of her. Dirty and sweating and parched, she pulled her canister out of her sack with weak hands, and greedily gulped down the last of the water. Her head ached from the heat and the lack of sustenance. The helmet made her scalp hot, and plastered her hair to her skull underneath it. Peeling it off, she shook the sand away as best she could, and then she got to her feet.

Beneath her, the fighter shifted. Her heart skipped a beat and she grabbed tightly onto the sides of the cockpit as the little ship swayed precariously, durasteel groaning in protest. Slowly, very carefully, she lifted herself out through the hole in the cockpit, then looked down at the fighter below her.

The sandstorm had not buried her; it had swept the sand right away. The starfighter was less than half-buried now, its beaten-up and half broken wings visible to the naked eye. The girl stood there, frozen, gazing down at the shape beneath her. She tucked the helmet beneath one arm, then carefully clambered out of the thing, edging along one wing, then jumping off into the sand.

She looked up at the fighter. She was hot, and tired, and hurting, but all of this faded away. Awe and pride rose incongruously in her stomach as she recognized what it was she was looking at.

 _This_ , she thought, her whole body trembling, _is an X-wing_.

—

The girl returned to Niima Outpost proudly, dragging her haul along behind her. The other scavengers stopped their cleaning and openly gaped in shock. Some had thought her dead; others had not thought of her at all. Certainly none of them had anticipated this.

The X-Wing had been so full of functional machinery that she could not have hoped to scavenge it all in one day. She had been careful to select parts of value, but had hidden others in hard-to-find compartments, knowing that a time would come in the future when she needed those portions more than she did now. Without even bothering to spend time cleaning or tending to her treasure (she would, normally, but some part of her knew that without food or water she would not last much longer at all, so she had no time today) – the girl went straight to the stand which belonged to Unkar Plutt, and, one-by-one, she placed her day’s findings before the slimy alien.

Dismissively, Unkar Plutt inspected the items, glancing over them with one eye and pawing at them with one huge hand.

“What you have brought me today,” he said, in his voice like belch bubbles breaching the surface of water, “is worth…fifteen portions.”

The girl despaired.

“Fifteen?” she replied, anger sparking in her insides. “This is worth twice that! At the very least!”

Plutt leered down at her mercilessly. “Ten.”

Deep in her belly, the spark of anger flared, then died. It was no use arguing with Unkar Plutt. She knew that, however much it grated her to admit it.

An idea struck her. She did not move for a moment, for she did not want to agree with this idea, did not want to put it into motion. And yet. She had very little choice.

Reluctantly, she lifted the helmet from its place below her arm, and lifted it as well onto the counter before the alien. His eyes lifted in interest for only one moment, then swept it away angrily. “Stupid girl,” he growled at her. “You think the Rebellion is looking to buy _antiques?_ Come back when you have something the First Order might be interested in.” He snorted through his ugly nose, and shoved the helmet back down at her. “This is worth _nothing_.”

So the girl took the ten portions, and the helmet.

She did not stop to greet the other scavengers, or any of those trading at Niima Outpost. She turned, and left, and trekked back to the fallen AT-AT she called home.

Inside, she made two marks on the wall. One for yesterday, one for today. With a few drops of water she fed the small plant she cultivated, which the trader had promised her would bear fruit one day, although she had come to doubt that. She didn’t mind. She kept it anyway.

She carefully hid away her portions, taking out a one-quarter to eat today. Then she paused, looked at the food before her, and decided to take one-half for herself. It had been a long two days. And she had seen, for the first time, an X-wing.

She took her meal outside, beneath the forgiving shade her shelter provided. First she ate, because she was hungry and had never found any sense in prolonging the wait for sustenance when she had the option not to do so. For a while, she peered out at the desert before her. She was dirty and sweaty and hot, but that was nothing new. But something felt different. Maybe something had been kicked around in her head by the strange dreams she had had, dislodged when she slipped into the cockpit of that X-wing.

Beside her, the helmet sat patiently on the sand. She looked around at it, then picked it up in her hands, turning it over and over. It was dirty and worn from all those years unused. She buffed at its side with her sleeve. Vaguely, she wondered what had become of its owner. She remembered the woman’s screaming, the flash of heat on one side of the cockpit. She felt slightly sick in her stomach. For once, she was glad for the scavenging desert sand-rats.

Running her hands across the surface of the helmet, she saw the yellow Alliance Starbird, the blue and yellow stripes. There was an old man in town who knew things about the old Alliance, the Galactic Civil War, and the Battle of Jakku. He might be able to tell her who this belonged to, what squadron they flew with, what rank they held.

On the side, the girl spotted three letters stamped there in Aurebesh. These were letters she could recognize, even if she was not sure how she knew them. A frown graced her brow, stitching together the letters in her mind. _Resh-enth-herf. R-ae-h. Raeh_.

“Rey,” she whispered.

A cool peace swelled within her, washing away the aches and pangs of hunger and exhaustion. The name sprang to her lips as if it had been waiting for her to find it all along, like a friendly wave through the veil of time. This is a name. She is not sure exactly if it is her name, the one given to her by the family she does not know, but suddenly, for the first time – that doesn’t matter. This is not a name she was given. This is a name she found. And it belongs to her.

The girl traces her fingers along the lines of the letters, basking in the glory of a word emblazoned on the side of a fighter helmet.

Yesterday she owned nothing. Nothing of value, nothing that could not be sold or exchanged should the need arise. Yesterday she _was_ nothing.

Today, she owns a helmet, and she has a name.


End file.
